In the Blood
by DreadNot
Summary: Modern urban fantasy AU vignettes. Because blood magic and vampirism are just made for each other.
1. Hawke and Merrill

**When it starts…**

She's not a bad person, Hawke thinks, taking a seat across the table from Merrill. She's made some bad choices that she can't take back, but despite that, she's not _bad. _

He smiles wryly and thinks, _she's not bad, she's just drawn that way._ Only this isn't some movie that mixes animation with reality.

She takes a glass from Norah and drinks, red staining the tiny creases in her lips before she licks them and forces a smile. "Mm. I think she's figured out the 'blood' setting on the microwave. It's just right."

They both know she's lying. Ox blood will never pack the same punch as the blood of a sentient being. It's decaf when a vampire wants a triple latte.

But she tries. Hawke gives her credit for that.

It's too late for _I told you so's_ with Merrill. It's been too late for years, but together they've kept her on the straight and narrow. Or straight enough and narrow enough that he hasn't had to kill her.

He hates killing friends. He's lost enough pieces of his heart already, and Carver would never forgive him. Merrill is Carver's reason to hope. If Merrill could do it….

Hawke pushes the thought aside. He doesn't share Carver's optimism. Once a mage goes far enough to the blood, willing or not, there's no turning back.

"Have you heard anything new?"

He knows the answer before she can tell him no. It's really just an excuse to meet. Not that this dive bar that serves anyone and anything as long as you don't start a fight makes for a warm and welcoming setting.

Hawke's only there on sufferance, because technically he never starts fights in The Hanged Man, he only finishes them.

But it's the only place in Kirkwall where a vampire (even one on the wagon) and an apostate can sit down together for a drink, talk a little shop, and just be themselves without someone calling 911, or worse, texting Meredith's stormtroopers with a hot tip. You got good money for narcing on bloodsuckers after all.

"You know they don't tell me anything," she says, then surprises him. "But I've been hearing some talk in my neighborhood. Everyone blames everything on vampires, but…" She shrugs and takes another sip of ox blood. He sympathizes with her efforts. Every mage has heard the song in the blood. If you believed everything you saw on TV, you'd believe that every mage gave in to the song too, and the world was just teeming with vamps dying to bleed you dry or sacrifice you to flood the streets with demons.

"Go on," he says encouragingly. "You know I don't blame everything on vampires. Never underestimate the stupidity of plain old mortals. After all, you know Carver."

She gives him a wan smile. "Women are disappearing, and the word is that it's vampires, but… they're older, Hawke, and they aren't mages, so the blood…."

"Isn't as good," Hawke finishes for her.

"It isn't worth the risk." She sounds tired, but she always sounds tired. The night when she doesn't sound tired, Hawke will start to worry.

His phone vibrates in his pocket. A quick glance shows him a text. "We need to talk." It's Fenris' number. It vibrates again. "Now."

He sighs and sends back, "Hanged Man. Now." before he offers Merrill an apologetic smile. "You might want to go."

She looks at the phone in his hands. "It's him, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

She leaves the glass unfinished and stands up. "I have a list of names. I'll email them."

Hawke stands up and opens his arms to her. It's always a little awkward, but he offers every time, because no one else touches Merrill, and that's not a life anyone should have to lead, not even a vampire.


	2. Isabela and Anders

**It just keeps going…**

Anders doesn't even look up when the TV in the waiting room blares the familiar theme music at the opening of Grand Cleric Elthina's 8:00 p.m. benediction. She'll mouth some platitudes about the Chantry's love and care for all citizens, remind everyone that the Maker loves them (as long as they aren't mages or nonbelievers), and include a guilt trip about how donations to the Chantry should be up as they near the year's end celebrations.

He's heard it all before.

He shuffles through the stack of folders in his hands before looking up to search the clinic for a familiar face. "Isabela?"

Isabela stands, and three women and a lithe young man stand with her. They know the drill by now and follow him when he turns without a word to go back down the hall to the largest of the exam rooms.

Isabela and her little lambs get group treatment because that's all he can afford to give them and still have time for the kids with whooping cough, the miners with grey lung from working the Bone Pit, and the myriad other ailments that the Chantry says are the Maker's will while those mealy-mouthed clerics don't do a blighted thing to help out.

Isabela escorts her charges inside and leans against the closed door while Anders hands them each a clean cloth exam gown.

"How are they doing?" he asks her while the four strip and pull on the rough garments. "Anything I should know about?"

"Nice to see you too, sweet thing," Isabela says, patting his cheek. "Renny's had a cough. Dahlia needs a pelvic. Brie and Lise are tip-top."

Brie and Lise go first, getting a perfunctory exam augmented by a light touch of magic that confirms without having to get invasive that they are indeed tip-top. He gives Isabela the thumbs up and tells them to get dressed while he moves on to Renny and his cough.

"Quit smoking." Anders is brusque about it, mostly because Renny's not smoking cigarettes.

Isabela catches the message when Anders looks over Renny's shoulder and nods. Anders tells him to get dressed. If Renny wants to burn out his lungs smoking the latest Orlesian poison, that's Renny's problem, not his.

It's Isabela's as well, because if one of her little lambs develops an expensive habit, he might think that he can subsidize by stealing from his customers. Isabela's business runs on safety - safety for her charges, safety for their clients.

Her business might not be legal in the strictest Aveline Hendyr sense of things, but Isabela sees to it that her clients and employees got a better quality of fucking under her oversight than they could ever get from the justice system.

He sends the others out to give Dahlia some privacy for her pelvic, and eventually sends Dahlia out to Isabela with a bottle of antibiotics, a strict "no work" order for the next month, and a surreptitious booster of magic in addition to the pills to ensure their efficacy.

Isabela blocks the door while he's stripping the paper off the exam table.

"So…"

In that single purred word, he knows exactly what she's going to ask. "I haven't fucked him."

"Why not? What's taking you so long, I want all the juicy details when you do."

He's tired. He's tired of the endless line of patients, the work, the hours, the after hours, the loneliness, the not-loneliness, and he's tired of Isabela asking him why he still hasn't fucked Garrett Hawke after three years of blue balls and frusterbation.

And he's tired of the reason.

"I'll give you one guess, and if it isn't tall, dark, and broody, you might want to rethink that whole 'I'm an excellent judge of character' thing you've got going on."

"I still think polyamory would fix all your problems," Isabela says, leaning in to smack Anders' ass as he passes her with an armful of exam gowns.

"Yeah? Try telling that to Fenris. Does he strike you as the sharing type?" .

The receptionist tells him later that she paid double for the exams. Just like always.


	3. Sebastian and Bethany

**Until the sun comes up…**

"Oh look, it's big brother's big bad Chantry friend."

Sebastian knows her voice and turns warily to see Bethany Hawke slip out of the shadows. He never knew her before she was taken during the Hawke family's flight from Lothering, but there is no doubt that she is beautiful.

Carver has shown him pictures from before the Blight took her. She was prettier then, with fewer hard edges and planes to her features and figure, but her beauty now is sharp enough to cut.

He has a gun. He could draw and fire before she had a chance to move, but he stays his hand for the sake of a friend. He asks the same question he asks every time she emerges from whatever dark bolthole she has found in the city, "What do you want?"

She takes a step back, out of the glow of the street light and into the shadows. Her voice when she speaks does not match the mocking smile she had first given him.

She asks the same question she asks every time she comes to find him. "How is Carver?"

This is why he does not draw his weapon, even though it is his duty as a Chantry brother to help eradicate the evil that wears the faces of loved ones. Even though he knows that given half a chance, she will spread her infection to another hapless mage.

He knows Carver Hawke, and he cannot bring himself to kill what remains of his twin sister.

"He's finished his training," he tells her. "He's a templar, even if he still hasn't turned in his brother or told his superiors that you're here."

"That's my brother," she says, and Sebastian almost believes she sounds proud. "Sticking it to the man. It's just like him to be the man at the same time. He always was contrary."

"Don't you want to know about Hawke?" She never asks. He always offers.

Her answer is always the same. "Why would I?"

"Because he's your brother, too?"

He does not offer information about Leandra Hawke. The one time he mentioned Bethany's mother to her, she flew into a rage, screaming at him before disappearing into the night. Sebastian can't pretend to know the mind of a vampire, but it has always seemed to him that it hurts Bethany to think of her mother in ways that it doesn't hurt her to think of her brothers.

As an orphan, _that_ hurts him.

Usually she leaves him without answering his question about Hawke. It has become almost a litany he can repeat with the same familiarity as the Chant - ask, reply, comment, ask, retort, reply, leave. All he would need to do would be to insert some kneeling and standing at random intervals to feel just like a proper religious service.

Tonight she says, "Garrett's meeting the big bad wolf. You can tell him we watch him. Tell him…"

"Tell him what?"

But she's gone, and Sebastian is chilled to consider that perhaps the reason she asks after Carver isn't because she cares, but because vampires can't get to the Gallows to spy on a templar in training the way they can spy on Hawke in the city.

Has he been acting as an unwitting cat's paw for the past three years?

He watches the shadows while he takes out his phone and punches in a terse message to Hawke. "Where are you?"


	4. Hawke and Fenris

**Don't wait for sundown…**

Hawke's expression turns wary when Fenris pushes through the bar's wards and over the threshold. As always, Fenris has to suppress a snarl at the press of magic against his body before it yields enough to admit him. He knows that it is his anger that causes the wards to react, but he might as well live without his spine as without his rage.

He thumps his motorcycle helmet down on Hawke's table, making an abandoned glass rock and tilt before Hawke catches it to keep it from spilling.

"Norah!" Hawke holds up the glass for Norah to take away, but not before Fenris sees the thick red liquid that clings to the sides and makes a viscous clot at the bottom.

His scars sluggishly react to the blood - animal blood, then, or they would be burning. He should know not to expect anything worse here. The Hanged Man caters to the worst of Kirkwall's underground, but Corff draws the line at bleeding sentient beings for his patrons.

"She was here." Fenris can't help the venom that slips into his tone when he makes mention of Merrill. It's hard enough to reconcile his respect for Hawke with the fact that the man is a mage, but the wash of doubt he feels every time he's reminded that Hawke maintains a friendship with a vampire is a thousand times worse.

"I saw Merrill," Hawke says mildly, but Fenris still hears the steely edge under the softness. "She's my friend."

"You could do with better friends," Fenris growls, finally dropping into a seat next to Hawke to the accompaniment of loud creaking from his motorcycle leathers.

"Funny, that's what people say about you."

Norah returns without being asked - or maybe Hawke made his order in advance - with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Hawke sends her away with a few bills pressed into her hand and opens the bottle himself. Fenris knows that Hawke takes a strange satisfaction in opening wine bottles. Hawke has never been able to explain why, but given any choice, he always produces his multi-tool (equipped with corkscrew, flat and philips head screwdrivers, saw, file, wickedly sharp knife – Fenris would not blink if Hawke unfolded a blowtorch from the blasted thing) and pulls the cork himself.

"You're riding, huh?" Hawke says and pours Fenris half a glass before pouring a full glass for himself. "I'll call a cab."

"You could ride with me." The words are out of Fenris' mouth before he can take them back, and really, he doesn't want to take them back. He loves having Hawke ride pillion with him. It's intimacy without intimacy, which is as much as he thinks he can manage, for now. Maybe forever.

Hawke's expression turns sharp before he nods. "We're going the same way. You could stop in, say hi. Mother always asks after you."

Leandra Hawke probably asked after all of Hawke's friends. Fenris isn't sure if it's concern for them, or concern that her son had fallen in with an unsuitable crowd. Fenris ticks off Hawke's closest friends in his head – a scarred elven former vampire thrall, a woman who made most of her spending money herding prostitutes, a former prince who had been sent to the Chantry in disgrace before his whole family was murdered, an author best known for his explicit sex scenes and veiled references to Kirkwall notables, a doctor who could produce no actual medical credentials and who is also a runaway Grey Warden apostate, a vampire, and oh, Kirkwall's police chief. One out of seven isn't bad?

"You didn't want to see me just to give me a hard time about my friends."

Hawke's words bring his thoughts back to the matter at hand. "I was jumped tonight by a pair of vampires and their thralls. I had a chance to question one before he died and I know where they have gone to ground."

"Are they related to–"

"Danarius?" Fenris' stomach twists and he feels his lips twist too. "Yes. My _master_ sent them."

Hawke gives him the only answer he expects from the only mage he could ever trust. "Of course I'll go, and we'll bring friends."


End file.
